What’s your IT infrastructure up to?

Big IT failures and problems always seem to make the news and it often takes a big ‘real world’ problem for people to realise the importance that IT has within almost every sector.

And while not all is revealed to the public eye as to how or why such IT failures occur – nor may they really care as long as their service continues to work – it is safe to say that no company wants to be the one that incurs an IT failure or problem, as this can directly affect the way they’re perceived by staff, existing and prospective customers.

So, the question is, how can they mitigate and protect against it from happening?

Well, this isn’t just about having the right IT infrastructure in place – although of course that helps – but it is about monitoring that IT infrastructure. Often, businesses may neglect monitoring their infrastructure due to budget constraints or lack of interest, but it can very quickly become a priority when a serious issue occurs.

Without careful monitoring of IT infrastructure, downtime and critical issues can become increasingly more likely causing serious impact to the business. Being pro-active and making sure you have a monitoring system in place can help you be better prepared and maximise the efficiency of your IT infrastructure.

Key reasons for monitoring

There are a number of benefits for organisations from monitoring IT infrastructure beyond just detecting issues.

Troubleshooting

By monitoring IT infrastructure, potential issues can be identified and detected before they become critical and result in downtime. A good monitoring system can enable you to detect and resolve issues before any users get affected.

Reporting

A monitoring system gives you complete visibility of your IT infrastructure so can help provide useful metrics and analytics. Regular reporting can help you gain insights into a number of areas such as identifying trends, usage levels, network/system availability.

Efficiency

With issue detection and troubleshooting taking less time with a monitoring system, IT resources can be freed up to focus on core infrastructure and IT services and service delivery.

vROps as a monitoring tool

When it comes to monitoring there are a number of tools and solutions available, in my experience working in this area, I’m finding that many organisations are opting for VMware vRealize® Operations™ Manager (vROps) as their preferred monitoring tool for the entire estate, whether it be Virtual or Physical.

vROps is VMware’s operations management and monitoring product that enables organisations to consolidate multiple tools as they strive to achieve that holy grail of getting a single source of truth that covers the whole estate.

Built with resilience in mind, coming with built-in features such as High Availability to help protect against an analytics cluster node failure, vROps also offers tremendous extensibility by way of management packs via VMware, Blue Medora vROps integration, or the vendor of the product that you want to monitor.

What’s more, VMware (and Blue Medora integration packs) also allow users to hook in their hybrid cloud estate, so whether you have applications or workloads in Azure or AWS, you can centrally monitor and alert effectively.

vROps provides a whole host of benefits to organisations as a comprehensive solution for IT infrastructure monitoring, including:

Automation – vROps can not only alert but also remediate, either manually via prompts or automatically, both using hook ins to vCenter and vRO

Customisation – whether it be dashboards or reports, customers can tailor vROps to suit their specific needs

Capacity planning – with the projects feature you can present or change scenarios to vROps and it will give you instant feedback on the impact it would have risk-based alerts – vROps can forewarn people of a potential issue with regards to disk growth, or usage of CPU/RAM/LAN

Effective and concise alerting – using the ability to filter out all the background noise and understand what is really going on in the estate

In addition to all the business benefits, vROps also has a strong user community that can offer tips, tricks and guidance to get the most out of vROps.

Final thoughts

The bottom line is, businesses want to quickly know where there is an issue and what caused it, but perhaps more importantly, where an issue may be initiating so that it can be stopped before it becomes serious. Monitoring IT infrastructure and vROps can help businesses achieve this, or at the very least give a firm handle on what is happening and why, so issues, problems and failures can be addressed quickly and efficiently.

If you want to know more about how you can maximise the efficiency of your IT infrastructure and monitoring solutions, then Xtravirt can help. We provide advisory, design and implementation services to create the right solution for your organisation. Contact us and we’d be happy to use our wealth of knowledge and experience to assist you.

Simon Eady is an Xtravirt Senior Consultant with over 20 years’ experience in the IT industry. He has delivered a wide range of projects including solutions for server consolidation, data centre migration and upgrade, and deployment of Microsoft and VMware product sets. His specialist areas include VMware virtualisation helping businesses create, develop and maintain a multi cloud strategy. Simon is also a vExpert 2014-19 and leader of the South West UK VMUG (VMware User Group).